Where do you take your pain?

When things are uncomfortable in your life, and the pain is challenging, where do you turn?

Perhaps at the end of a long day at the office you settle on the deck on a Summer's evening with a glass of chardonnay. Every sip takes you further away from the woes of the day, and you start to unwind. After the second glass your shoulders relax. After the third, hell, you even like your job again.

Or maybe you plop on the couch and rip into a bag of chips or wolf down a chocolate bar while watching some mindless television. You're bored with your lot in life and it's become a habit. At the end of the night when you go to bed, you cannot recall what you watched on tv, and you stopping tasting the junk-food after the first few bites.

Both these scenarios are not unfamiliar to me, as I have used both food and alcohol to fill my God-shaped hole. I have also used men, travel, education, changes in vocations and psychics to numb the terrible emptiness that has surfaced from time to time.

Although my reconnection with God started some eleven years ago, at the age of twenty-eight, it wasn't until my journey with secondary infertility started that the true extent of my God-shaped hole was revealed.

I stopped using alcohol as an escape from life a while ago. However I continued to hide from life through over-eating, even if it was on a much smaller scale than before. It wasn't until I dramatically cut down on sugary foods as part of a fertility make-over last year that I realised how much I'd been comfort-eating.

As a result, secondary infertility has been the first crisis I've experienced without a vice or anything to distract me from my pain. I have been stripped bare and as a result, God is finally able to start filling the hole I desperately filled with anything I could think of for years with His love. This is both a painful and welcome process as it means I have to truly surrender it all to Him.

I don't believe God wants me to suffer, only to turn to Him at this time. I'm starting to believe that secondary infertility happened to me in order to bring me closer to God. After all, if a second baby came along easily, I would not be embracing spiritual healing with the intensity I am today.